Race and Support for Harsh Penalties for Juveniles

By Christopher Shea

In 2005, the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional to impose the death penalty on people who had committed their crimes before the age of 18. In this term, it is weighing whether life without parole is also a penalty too severe for people who, in the eyes of many, do not possess the same level of self-control, maturity, and comprehension of the consequences of their actions as adults.

A recent study looked at whether white Americans’ beliefs about this issue are influenced by race. Perhaps unshockingly, they turned out to be.

A nationally representative sample of white adults read background material about the debate over life without parole for teenagers, and then read about one 14-year old who had received this very severe penalty: With 17 previous juvenile convictions, he brutally raped an elderly woman. Roughly half of the test subjects read that this person was a “white male,” the others that he was a “black male”; otherwise, the materials were identical.

Whites who read about a black criminal were more likely to endorse life without parole for teenagers. The effect was small but statistically significant: A difference of .22 points on a seven-point scale. There was a difference of a similar magnitude on the question of whether teenagers are just as blameworthy for serious crimes as adults: People who read about a black criminal were more likely to say that they were equally culpable.

The authors suggest that the effect of race on attitudes on this issue would probably be even larger if race had been emphasized more strongly, beyond the one-word tweak in the material participants read — for example, if they’d seen photographs of the convicts.